Sisterhood, childhood, friendships
Mom Camp: Stories and Novella
by Veronique Darwin
Picton: Assembly Press, 2026
$23.95 / 9781998336319
Reviewed by Alison Acheson
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Years ago, I read a poetic novel, Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I read with my natural reading speed; I suspect we all have such an internal pace that generally works together with the flow of the work in hand.
Then I slowed my read—a result of the poetic force. And realized that, no, I needed to let the words flow over me, even as I absorbed moments later, a loop of delayed understanding that captured the sounds, then the meaning. Or poetry read at novel-pace. That book was, among other things, a lesson in reading. Some books are.
I tried to find such a looping pace to read Mom Camp, the debut fiction collection by Rossland-based Veronique Darwin, and thought perhaps I was in for another lesson.
The title set me up with expectations, as did the fulsome blurbs, with words about clear-eyed precision and inventiveness. It’s said to be filled with the “complexities of motherhood,” although the collection doesn’t venture far beyond the adult adjustment to becoming a parent. Rather, after the opening and titular story, the stories are of sister- and childhood and women’s friendships.
What I did find inventive is how Darwin treads fearless with omniscient point of view. Within two paragraphs one character can be “feeling dread” and the reader also knows that another admits to lying, and that’s okay. Good to see this erupting—to use a blurb word—from the flattening that can take place in the MFA workshop.
Repetition doesn’t scare Darwin either; she understands that when it works, it works. Thus: “All this thinking about the place I work means I’ve outgrown the job, the very jobbiness of it.”
Perhaps the work as a whole would have benefitted from being two collections—a set of novellas and a collection of short fiction. Or, a complete novel. That might have allowed the elliptical style to take full shape, and find its own pace, that piece I’m missing.
I’d still argue the need for physicality, too, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll share a paragraph I loved, before further thoughts on pace and physicality.
The paragraph:
Tia’s job is installing spikes on buildings so pigeons can’t land on them. The problem with her job… is that she hates the spikes…. Really, Tia wants a job where she can release pigeons…. Tia wants pigeons to be free, but that requires her to determine who pigeons are and what freedom is. She continues installing the spikes on the buildings so the pigeons can’t land. She is telling them, Your freedom is not here. Your freedom is somewhere else. She only wishes she could help them figure out where.
This sums much of what many people are living now: the jobs in our world, and their purpose, and a sense of the inability to enact meaningful choices or make real changes. Understanding the character of Tia grows sentence by sentence.
In one of the threads of stories—and they are threads, as many of these stories are connected (though they might not flow readily as connecting)—one character creates a box with a woman drawn on each one of the six sides of the box. It might be a metaphor for the read, and the sense of being boxed in ways. There’s an almost constant sense of struggling with that flow of read, stopped often by a lack of physicality; the read is broken by the need to recalibrate.
A memoir writer, Mary Karr, renames physicality as “carnality,” and says it is the groundedness that evokes story. Throughout the stories of Mom Camp, there’s a skewed sense of the physical. Bodies are constantly doing irreconcilable acts. Motions of “rolling to knees” from a position one has to pause to consider, or the impossibility of “being able to connect eyes” with a body “thrust forward out of a window.” My mind stalls; how would this work? Such physicality should be described so that the reader can move through with the rich sense of inhabiting.
There are remarkably few descriptors in these stories, a choice based on the idea that we make assumptions about each other is thinking, that we all see the ________ (fill in the blank) in the same way. But what if we don’t? Isn’t that part of the surprise in fiction? Isn’t that part of the grounding in another world, a world created in wee black marking on a piece of paper, pulp or virtual, and transferred via our imagination—our image-takers—into our souls? I miss that grounding and that refreshing worldview surprise in these pages. Even as the characters themselves come up with delightful bits such as the description of a grade seven student who “lives inside his hoodie.” This gave grounding, physicality, and with that, character, both the observed and the observing.
But too often the read was: “Suze planted her long beach chair. She lay shirtless on her front and covered her head with her arms. She moved her long brown hair to one side. It almost touched the rocks.”
This paragraph—and many similar—took too long to process. I saw the word “chair” and it didn’t occur to me that someone might lie down on a chair. So I imagined her setting up her chair but then lying down next to it. And then had to struggle to know why “long” hair wouldn’t reach the rocks, presumably close to her head. I found myself wondering how long is long, and—back to the chair!—once I realized it was some sort of chaise lounge type, how long it wasn’t. Why worry about hair falling onto rocks? And we are told it’s rocks, yet who “plants” a chair in rocks, not sand? This is how my mind rabbit-holed as I read. I even had an internal image of those ancient summer chairs with the uncomfortable plastic webbing, and my mind snagged on the thought of those bared nips caught in it… Ah, the imagination flies ahead as we read, and must be reined in.
I apologize for that paragraph, a cross-section of my reading-mind.
For years, writers have been trimming description, and bits that might smack of stage direction. But here is a book that reads as if every other sentence has been cut, and dares the reader to fill in the blanks.
In many ways, the read reflects our current world, rather disembodied altogether, even as one character makes a point to “check… whether the tree wanted to be touched.” In one story, an aunt wonders about her relationship to her infant nephew: “He’ll think of me as an aunt, but I don’t know what that role is,” even though just one page before that, she says, “I know the name of the island I’m on, but why does it matter? The name isn’t the island. I only use it to tell a friend… that I’m here and not there.”
We live in a world of increasing anthropomorphism even as we grow more and more isolated from other humans, and we question “roles,” as opposed to relationships. I imagine many of these characters as those sad folks driving alone in their cars with their masks in place.
Some of the recent critique of AI products (I’ll not call them “writing”) points to similar anthropomorphic and disembodied work. No, this collection is not AI—not at all. But it does beg the chicken-and-egg question about where we’re at literarily, and how we got here. What came first? The MFA short story, striving to stand out from the pack? The “training” of the AI machine? The AI product, now winning our writing contests, judged by those who fail to recognize the difference and the similarities? We can no longer call AI slop, when we begin to reward it. But it may be that human writing is also following certain curves; maybe we need to think about this.
If the stories in this collection had the physicality that could pin them to the page so they could transcend the same, it would be so easy to fall in love with many of the other elements. There is the mell of woodfire smoke in the evening air, and the sounds of layers of laughter. Now, for a clearer path to the camp.
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Alison Acheson is the author of almost a dozen books for all ages, including a memoir of caregiving, Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS (TouchWood, 2019). She writes on Substack—The Unschool for Writers—and lives on the East Side of Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Alison has reviewed recent books by Bill Freeman and Mike Levitt, Linda DeMeulemeester, François Gravel and Martine Latulippe, Nikki Bergstresser and Kim Spencer, Catherine Little, Evelyn Sue Wong, Lorna Shultz Nicholson, Pam Withers, Becky Citra, Paul Yee, Leslie Gentile, Caroline Lavoie, Janice Lynn Mather, Li Charmaine Anne, Linda DeMeulemeester, and Hanako Masutani for BCR; Blue Hours, her 2025 novel, was reviewed by Trish Bowering.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster